An Exceedingly Short Introduction to Roman Law
5th June 2026
This realisation that law could provide answers to questions by using reasoning, rather than by authority alone, has profound implications not just for the sophistication of law, but for the idea of what we might call rights. If it is possible to work out that something must be the law (in a given case, perhaps as to what is due to us)[5] by reasoning from premises of things we already recognise as law, then it is possible to identify “law not simply positive [i.e. declared by an authority], but existing of right and coordinated and developed by reason.”[6] And further, if what is lawfully due to us can be identified by a process of rational argument based on the nature of things (known laws being among those things but not exhausting them), then it might be possible to say that we have natural rights, and that we might have those rights whether or not there is any legislation that declares we have them. It is ironic that a society that engaged pervasively in slavery nevertheless developed a conceptual apparatus that now offers perhaps the most powerful basis for defending universal human dignity.